But that isn’t completely true. BitTorrent is certainly used for piracy, but it’s also used for many legal things. If we banned BitTorrent tomorrow and removed it from the internet, many legitimate organizations, businesses, and content creators would have to scramble to replace it.

Like HTTP, which your browser uses to communicate with websites, BitTorrent is just a protocol. You could use your browser to download pirated content, just as you could use a BitTorrent client to download pirated content, but that isn’t the only possible use.

So while BitTorrent may primarily be used for downloading unauthorized content, that’s far from its only use, and the protocol still has a lot of value to people who don’t pirate.

1. Game Updates and Downloads

Blizzard Entertainment uses its own BitTorrent client to download World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III. When you purchase one of these games and download it, you’re actually just downloading a BitTorrent client that will do the rest of the work. When an update is available, the BitTorrent client built into the game’s launcher automatically downloads it for you.

This allows Blizzard to save money on bandwidth and offer faster download speeds to its many players. Players can choose whether they want to contribute their upload bandwidth to speed things up for other people.

2. Facebook and Twitter Use BitTorrent Internally

Moving a 1.5GB binary blob to countless servers is a non-trivial technical challenge. After exploring several solutions, Facebook came up with the idea of using BitTorrent, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. BitTorrent is very good at propagating large files over a large number of different servers.

BitTorrent is designed to distribute large files to multiple different computers, allowing each system to contribute some of its own bandwidth to speed up the process. This makes it useful for any situation where you want to transfer large files as fast as possible in a scalable way.

The Internet Archive recommends people use BitTorrent to download its content, as it’s the fastest method and allows the non-profit organization to save on bandwidth costs.

4. Government Uses

In 2010, the UK government released several large data sets showing how public money was being spent. To make these available, they offered them via BitTorrent. This allowed the government to save on bandwidth costs. And, let’s face it — BitTorrent is also the fastest way to make such documents available to the largest number of people possible.

NASA has also used BitTorrent to make a 2.9GB picture of the Earth available.

5. File Syncing With BitTorrent Sync

BitTorrent, Inc., the company behind BitTorrent, recently released BitTorrent Sync. BitTorrent Sync works differently from standard BitTorrent clients. It’s entirely private: you install the client, choose one or more folders to share, and then link it up with other computers. Files anyone places in their copy of the shared folder are all automatically synced with all other copies of the shared folders.

In this way, BitTorrent Sync is a lot like Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t store your files in a centralized server online — it just syncs them between computers you own or computers your friends own. This means that it offers easy file sharing over the Internet and, unlike Dropbox, you can sync an unlimited number of files as long as you have the space on your computers for them.

6. Linux ISOs

If you’re familiar with BitTorrent, you’ll know that BitTorrent users always say they’re downloading “Linux ISOs” as a joke when they’re actually downloading pirated content. This may be a common joke, but it’s also a good excuse — Linux ISOs are a common use for BitTorrent.

Whether you’re downloading the latest release of Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or any of the other best Linux distributionsThe Best Linux Operating SystemsThe Best Linux Operating SystemsThere are Linux distros available for every purpose, which makes choosing one difficult. Here's a list of the very best Linux operating systems to help.Read More, there’s a good chance you’re getting it via BitTorrent. These distributions offer themselves for free to everyone and they’re often 1 GB or larger. BitTorrent can help them save on bandwidth costs and speed up downloads.

7. Distributing Videos and Music

If you want to make media available—perhaps you’ve produced a documentary and want to release it for free or you’re a band that wants to release free music as a promotion—BitTorrent is one of the best ways to do it.

If you hosted the files yourself, you’d have to pay for a lot of bandwidth. If you make the files available via BitTorrent, you’d save a lot of bandwidth by letting your fans contribute their bandwidth as they downloaded your content. You’d also receive press just for making your files available via BitTorrent.

The official BitTorrent website has a list of “bundles” of music and videos artists make available to hook fans, just as radio was used to offer free music to large number of people in hopes that they’ll attend live shows and buy albums.

8. Distributing Any Large Data

BitTorrent is a great way to distribute any large chunk of data as fast as possible, saving money on bandwidth. In addition to all the uses above, BitTorrent has been used to share large scientific data sets with anyone interested. Any large chunk of data that’s free for anyone to access can be distributed publically with BitTorrent.

So What Does This Tell Us About BitTorrent?

If we look at the examples above, we can see that BitTorrent is very useful in several situations:

Public distribution of data that’s free for anyone to access. Whether it’s public domain videos, Linux ISOs, scientific data sets, or high-resolution pictures of the Earth, BitTorrent is an effective way to distribute the content. Even Blizzard doesn’t care if people use its BItTorrent clients to download its game files — they have to authenticate online before they can play the games, so Blizzard is happy to provide its game files to anyone.

Private distribution of data among a few trusted sources. Whether it’s Facebook and Twitter using BitTorrent to update their servers or average people using BitTorrent Sync to move their personal data back and forth between their computers, BitTorrent is a fast way to leverage multiple computers’ Internet connections and quickly sync data.

BitTorrent is a tool, and a particularly useful one — that’s why it’s so widely used for piracy. There was piracy before BitTorrent and there would be piracy after BitTorrent if BitTorrent died tomorrow. BitTorrent also allows the Internet to be more participatory, enabling average people to share their files without paying for massive amounts of bandwidth and contribute their own bandwidth to share other people’s files.

Do you use BitTorrent for other legal purposes? Leave a comment below and share them!

For a long time, I would use BitTorrent to download stuff I needed and would close the client when my file was finished. But lately, I've been thinking that I need to be more cooperative and help reduce the necessity of servers greatly. So whether you use it to get the latest Linux or the latest LibreOffice, when you've finished downloading it, keep it running! It's fun to watch the upload meter, knowing that someone across the globe may be pulling from your file to download something ;0)

Cloud torrents are the best.
Not advertising seedr rn but I get 4.5gb for free(paid plans are rip offs) cloud torrent storage so that I can download all those Linux updates via cloud torrent at 120mbps

As a microsoft trainer i need to spread the course files to 30-40 student pc's every week, instead of normal copy from our file server,to each individual pc, using a torrent localy i can set up a classroom in about 1h instead of about 6h, bittorrent client on all pc', start torrent, go for coffee.. done :) and very legal.

But, in the light of the recent problems coming out of the USA at the moment, I wonder what the NSA think of all this? For sure we all use in the linux world some form of torrenting but everyone here thinks that is illegal. It is still not clear in Germany if we by using the torrents to download e.g Debian .iso, we are braking some law in some US state. The widespread thought is that if the NSA and other government bodies in the US are watching and recording everything we download then this must be illegal.

Torrenting is not illegal. You will not be accused by the government of doing anything illegal because of torrenting legally. You may be watched more carefully for a time after downloading a torrenting client, but that is all.

You have left out the very critical aspect of the protocol. When one creates a torrent file the bittorrent client breaks up the file/s into,maybe, a couple of thousand pieces and creates a hash-tag. This is checked at the receiver's end for errors and the p[art that is invalid is re-downloaded. The end result is that the receiver gets EXACTLY what the creator had inbtended. There is ZERO possibility of any kind of virus creeping in, unless of course the creator put if in there. This is the most secure way of transferring the files.

I use BitTorrent Sync extensively to keep my clients informed about updates. What I am now working on is to create a startup batch file that will verify transfer completion and install the updates automatically.

The best part is it works in the background, internationally, with zero intervention by the client. I also keep friends and families with photos. I am most certainly not a fan of on line photo storage services.

That is one major fucking “unless of course” that you threw (up) on there, and one huge “ZERO” that doesn't look like a zero at all. Visually it's more square than oval—logically it's more of a range, let's say, between and including negative eleven, and positive six (or nine, I mean they're equal, we just haven't decided on which is upside-down). Oh, the human factor—the greatest risk factor, and the greatest challenge, in the history of any protocol touching upon the flawed human concept of “trust.” But of course, I really do see your point: it's an awesome feature, and BT is a great protocol.

(And hell no, never to confuse with the *ducking fick* BT Corporation of Brit-land—a venture that I, for future generations’s sake, wish had stayed, instead of spread like a maniac-depressive Umbrella Corp mishap on a gram of inside-five-asses-across-fifteen-borders-and-cut-with-adrenaline-then-injected über-crack gifted with serious roid rage.)

That said, tapping (because clicks are for grandmas) a Magnet link is comparable to pulling on a slot machine—watch the bits roll in, and hope for the best. Even on TPB, which has a well-trusted trust system, some trusted people screw up, some screw you up (deliberately), a few are cool people, and some probably aren't even people, but Terminators roaming the cloud.

But that's just how the world turned out, and how we maintain it. If you play the game, you take the heat. Every action is served with a reaction.

*R?mblestiltskin shall now return to his blueprints and whiteboards of world peace and no order.* ?

By the way, happy to hear from a Sync user—been wanting to test drive it. Glad it works well for you so far. Just buy a Mac and I'd write you some launch agent files to keep it all tight in the bee-gee (okay, “in the background”). Then again, I'm more a web guy, and named my last standalone script “Thong.rb”—will forever stand firmly by my decision!

Love what you use it for too. A couple of months ago I personally set up my home-brewed cloud storage solution with automatic bidirectional sync for selected folders, all on AWS with FUSE drive access. There's way too much fun to do!

MrN. Out.

PS. As for the article, I'm not the least bit surprised—a bit disappointed, but I'm never here and I'm not sure what I'm doing here now, so whatever and whatnot. I've personally been thinking if BT could someday work as distributed storage for unhosted website content and similar. Didn't feel right.

I use another client for my (____________) downloads but thanks to this article, I've learned about a couple of sites that I didn't know even existed. Didn't know there was such an animal as an Internet Archive but II'm darn sure glad you mentioned it!!

As I always tell everyone I know, MUO's email list is a great place to be!! Thanks!

Chris: Good article. I have always been afraid to use a BitTorrent client in that I read that some ISP's will slow down a users bandwidth if the ISP discovers the computer user is running a BitTorrent client. Is this true? If so, is there any way to hide the use of the BitTorrent client from the ISP?

They could slow it down, but it may be for their own protection. If everybody used BitTorrent to download (legitimate) stuff, then the bandwidth would be colossal. Torrents can go pretty fast. If they slowed something down because the content is copyrighted material, then the solution is to only download free and open-source stuff (Linux, LibreOffice, OpenShot, and dozens of other free software examples).

One can always fine illegal or antisocial uses for absolutely any technology in the world. So what is your point in name calling? Or do you subscribe to modified adage "It takes one to (know) call one"

I love torrents and it is the best way to move around large files. I used to be plagued when downloading and something happens and then would have to restart especially with Linux distributions.
So glad they moved to that route.